Thanks Kris. I respect your candor. You got me thinking about the way negative feedback snowballs. One thing leads to another until we’re total losers. Perhaps, making imperfect progress in one area, rather than “all of life” helps. (speaking for myself, of course)

Honestly, Dan, we should bring back the day of HONESTY. Everyone knows April begins with a day dedicated to lying…April Fool’s Day! Yet, not many people know that April 30th is National Honesty Day in the United States. It’s true. Author M. Hirsh Goldberg established National Honesty Day in the early 1990s as a way to honor the honorable and encourage honesty.

He believed if April was to begin “with fool’s lying,” perhaps April 30 should be a proper day to end on a high moral note.

Honesty Day would be a good time to review the value of this trait. While honesty is not as easy as it seems, an understanding of honesty begins with recognizing God—our ultimate example— is truth (Deut. 32:4) and that He cannot lie (Num. 23:19; Heb. 6:18). Also, He hates falsehood (Prov. 6:16-19). Beyond that, all lies have as their originator evil, himself (John 8:44).

I spent a large part of my working life providing scientific data to the government, and if nothing else it taught me about the gulf between the truth and the “right answer”. Most organisations and leaders are not prepared to look at their role in failure, and so are anything but open to uncomfortable truths. If they were, we wouldn’t need all the the elaborate mechanisms we have to have to protect whistle blowers.

Dan, this post is truly hitting at the heart of the matter in our workplace. There is far too much fear of saying what is really going on and that suffering in silence has led to the workplace bullying epidemic (as one example) that is happening globally. Here the thing – People will say things to staff that they would never say to the CEO and managers. That automatically means that the staff holds valuable information that the leaders need to know. Truth-telling needs to be supported and rewarded rather than squelched for all the reasons you outline. Great stuff, Dan. I hope it inspires much needed change.

I have experienced this and had a gut to tell the truth. I got a warning for that. I got a warning for telling that the company culture sucks and managements people management skills are poor.They are based on fear. Discovering that made me stronger. But worst of all, the leaders are fearfull because they do not know how things work. They just asuume instead of actually saying- let me see what you do, I want to know..

This is a gem to me: “An apology says you’re not perfect, but you’re trustworthy.” That can be applied to many business and personal shortfalls and failures. We had an issue in my company and I was kind of sharp with one of my teammates about the dreaded “what happened”. He had explained poorly and I had listened impatiently. I had to clearly tell him that I am sorry and I definitely don’t blame him for what happened before he was confident and happy – and able apply himself to our problem. I want to be trustworthy, since I can never be perfect 🙂

Sometimes when I read your articles I appropriate it into my relationship with my fiancee and I sometimes define leadership as ‘robust attitude’. My fiancee is melancholic and tends to shut a lot of information inside even if it hurts her. I really wanted her to speak up more often and I identified adopted a majority of these steps you highlighted here and it’s like a miracle. We always want to defend ourselves whenever we are hit the face with the truth so much so if the person was misinformed or misinterpreted what we meant. What I did was:
1. Resist the urge to defend myself
2. Appreciated her openness
3. Encouraged her to be more open and know that I am taking this criticism or talk as positive feedback.
4. Resist the urge to want to bring up some wrong she did before so she won’t feel am the only imperfect one. I rather delay it for another time when I generated the conversation.
It is in sync with most of your points here. I will adopt others and extend same to work colleagues. #Amazing